Congo-Kinshasa: DR Congo on World's Most Neglected Displacement Crises List for Tenth Consecutive Year

For the tenth year running, the Democratic Republic of Congo appears on the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) annual list of top neglected displacement crises, and the neglect is deepening.

“This is a testament to the world's failure to respond to crises that are not regarded as strategically important for rich countries,” said NRC’s Secretary General Jan Egeland. “Millions of people are being abandoned because we have chosen not to act, not because we cannot. The uncomfortable truth is that this neglect is a choice, and something we can choose to end.”

In 2025, just 27.4 per cent of the funding required to respond to the crisis in DR Congo was provided, the lowest rate in 10 years, leaving over 21 million people in need with no or drastically reduced assistance. A decade ago, the international community was providing 55 US dollars per person in need in DR Congo. Today that figure has collapsed to under 33 US dollars.

Countries such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Mali and Nigeria have all featured on the list six or more times, pointing to a systemic pattern of deliberate neglect rather than isolated failure.

“Donor governments have been presented with evidence of neglect, year after year. Yet those in power still choose to prioritise military and strategic investments and underfund, deprioritise and sideline the victims of these crises. It is a failure of our humanity,” said Egeland.

The report is the tenth edition of NRC's Neglected Displacement Crises Report, tracking how responses continue to fall short of the scale of suffering.

The 10 most neglected crises for 2025 are Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Honduras, Ecuador, Cameroon, Nigeria and Mozambique, spanning three continents and tens of millions of people the world continues to ignore.

The Neglected Displacement Crises Report assesses each crisis across four indicators: media coverage, funding, political attention, and scale of displacement. A lower score indicates a larger gap between the scale of human suffering and the adequacy of international response.

Sudan tops this year's list. More than 9 million people are internally displaced, and up to 4 million have fled to neighbouring countries. Nearly 19.5 million people inside Sudan are facing hunger, yet the international response remains wholly inadequate to that scale of suffering.

“It is incomprehensible that a displacement crisis of similar proportions to the crises in Syria and Ukraine at their peak can continue to worsen almost unnoticed,” Egeland said. “Just as needs i